Lü Jia

Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Macao Orchestra

Born into a musical family in Shanghai, Lü Jia began studying piano and violin from his parents at a very young age. He later studied conducting at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Under the instruction of renowned conductor Ms. Zheng Xiaoying, he graduated at the top of his class one year early. In 1988. The following year, he went to Germany’s Berlin University of the Arts, where he continued his studies under Professors Hans-Martin Rabenstein and Robert Wolf.

Lü has conducted 2,000 concerts and operas in Europe and the Americas, and has cooperated with more than 100 opera houses and orchestras, including the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and La Scala in Milan, as well as opera houses in Lausanne, Turin, Rome, Naples, Verona, Venice, Florence, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. He has also worked with the Berlin Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Bamberg Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Italy’s RAI National Symphony Orchestra, Rome’sOrchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, England’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Norway’s Oslo Philharmonic, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Lyon National Orchestra in France, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and all the major orchestras in Australia.

Lü Jia was the first Chinese conductor ever to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and to record the complete works of German composer Felix Mendelssohn. His symphonic performances, especially his interpretations of German works and those of the French Impressionists, have been praised as exemplars of "an extremely convincing musical interpretation" and "touching musical language and perfect conducting technique”. In September of 1989, he won First Prize and the Judges’ Prize in the “Antonio Perdrotti” International Conducting Competition in Italy, his entrée into a conducting career. In 1998, he conducted Giuseppe Verdi’s classic opera La Traviata, which was recognised as the best conducting performance in Italy’s Macerata Opera Festival. In 2005, in recognition of Lü Jia’s prominent contribution to Italy’s music culture, he was awarded the President's Cup by the President of the Italian Public, Giorgio Napolitano. In 2008, the La Gazza Ladra conducted by Lü Jia was named Best Opera of the Year in the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in Italy.

Opera has always played a special role in Lü Jia’s career. In Italy and Germany, homelands of the European opera tradition, he has directed nearly fifty operas. As the first Asian conductor to serve as director of a nationally-recognized opera company in Italy, he was praised by one Italian music critic as “a conductor who understands Italian opera even better than Italians do” .

Mr. Lü has been the Principal Conductor for the Trieste Opera, Tuscany Regional Orchestra in Florence, Lazio Chamber Orchestra in Rome, and Sweden’s Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra. He has also been a frequent guest conductor with the Hallé Orchestra and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England, the Dortmund Opera House in Germany, and the Milan Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra in Italy.

At present, Mr. Lü is Music Director of the Arena di Verona, the world’s largest open-air opera theater, and Artistic Director of the Symphony Orchestra of Tenerife in Spain. He is presently the artistic director of the Peking Opera Academy of Peking University and also the Guest Professor of the Xiamen Institue of Science and Technology of Huaqiao University。Since September of 2008, he is the Musical Director and Principal Conductor of the Macao Orchestra.